Except I had this giant missing part of myself.
I’d forgotten so much, and sometimes it felt like it was too much to ignore. Like there was this part of me that was supposed to be there, but it wasn’t. And when I realized that, it felt like this black pit of emptiness that was too big to even really comprehend. Sometimes I wasn’t sure that I could keep going without fixing it.
But I never ever talked about that anymore. The last time I did it earned me a nice ten-day hospital stay.
Mother mistook my words. She thought the emptiness meant that I was suicidal. But I wasn’t. It wasn’t that. It’s like I was forgetting something.
And I was. I was forgetting a whole bunch of somethings.
But I had to just keep moving forward. I couldn’t change the past, so I had to keep doing the things I was supposed to do. Eventually, if I tried hard enough, I would become who I was meant to be.
I just wished I knew who that was.
Chapter Fourteen
TESSA
Over the last few hours, the coffee shop had gotten a lot quieter. Most of the people cleared out around dinnertime, and now it was nearly empty. The words on the page were blurring together, and I was certain my stomach was eating itself, yet I still had at least another hour of studying to do. They weren’t going to close until then anyway, which meant I could stay. I should stay.
I scooted my chair away from the table.
Georgine looked up at me as I stood. “Where are you going?”
Why did it matter? Why did she always ask me? Why did I even have to talk to her?
God. I was annoyed with her, but it was probably mostly hunger. Not the fact that Mother already called me to get the full details on who yelled at me, and the lectured me about being more careful and how it was my fault that the girl went nuts on me.
My patience was shot, but that didn’t excuse me from being an asshole. “I’m getting more food. Do you want anything?”
“More food?” She looked
at me as if this wasn’t my normal. As if I was a disgusting creature because I was hungry. “You know you’re not supposed to eat that much. You don’t have the normal hunger signals that you’re supposed to have and—”
“Yeah. I know, but I’m hungry. I can’t study if I can’t focus beyond being hungry.” I bit the words out. Could she not tell that if she asked me one more question, I was going to lose my shit?
“But you just ate a muffin an hour ago.”
Okay. That wasn’t technically a question. I could do this. I could behave normally. “I only ate half a muffin an hour ago because you ate the rest, and now I need more food, or I won’t be able to concentrate.” I wasn’t about to defend my eating habits. I ate when I was hungry, and I was hungry. So, I was eating. Every time I sat down with food, I tried to eat a normal amount because she was right, I did lack the typical hunger cues. But this didn’t need to be a discussion.
No. It wasn’t a discussion. I could end this by walking away, and that’s exactly what I was going to do.
I grabbed my wallet and walked over to the line. When it was my turn, I ordered two sandwiches, a bag of chips, and a brownie.
Maybe I didn’t need the second sandwich, but Georgine ate half of my muffin. She did it with this evil look on her face as if she were egging me on to do something. What, I didn’t know. But something.
And now I was really, seriously hungry. Which meant I was dangerous.
I took the word “hangry” to a new, special, mostly evil place. It scared me sometimes.
I almost added a hot chocolate to my order, but I’d never hear the end of that. Georgine almost never ate more than once a day. And even when she did eat, it was always very little. I’d once made the mistake of asking her if she had a dieting problem, but that just turned into a tirade about how disgusting I was for eating meat.
Fine. Whatever. She had her very specific diet, and mine was more of an everything-in-sight kind of a thing.
When I sat down with my food, Georgine stared at it and then made a face at me as expected.
I took a giant bite of my first sandwich. “Problem?” I said around my mouthful of food.
“Is that cow?” Georgine’s tone was dripping with disgust.